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With our increasing longevity, we seem to be trading our focus
on the ‘fountain of youth’ for the ‘fountain of usefulness,’ where
having purpose outweighs a desire for youthfulness. In a recent
survey, 83 percent of those ages 65 and older say it’s more
important to be “useful than youthful” in their retirement years.
Think kids these days are getting too much screen time? There’s
another demographic struggling to put down their phones: Baby
Boomers. As one 83-year-old put it: “I’m so attached to this thing.
If I leave the house and forget (it), I’ll go back.”1
As we look ahead to a new year, the sense of uncertainty many of
us feel today may not be entirely new. While Canadian consumer
sentiment recently turned negative, and the number of times
“uncertainty” appears in the Canadian press reached its highest
level since the pandemic, consider that we’ve been here before.
When ChatGPT reached 100 million active users in just two months, it highlighted the accelerating pace at which technology is transforming the world. Consider that it took the social media platform Instagram 2.5 years to reach the same user base and the internet 7 years to acquire 50 million users.
It may seem implausible, but some researchers believe that the first person to live to 150 has already been born. Our lifespan, and more crucially, our “healthspan” — the period in which we are in good physical and mental shape — continues to extend.
